C.D. Broad

LECTURES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

C.D. Broad, together with C.J. Ducasse and H.H. Price, was one of the
philosophers who, in the 1950s and 1960s, took seriously the question of
parapsychology, or psychical research as it was then known. This book is
based on a series of twelve lectures which Broad gave at Cambridge in
1959 and 1960 but also includes a good deal of other material. Broad was
one of the best known and most respected philosophers of mind of his
generation and therefore his views on the paranormal cannot be dismissed
as the product of loose thinking or foolish speculation. Moreover, he is
interesting because, although he was prepared to consider the
possibility of postmortem survival, he was not at all sympathetic to
religion, and he tells us that he is not enthusiastic about the prospect
of survival for himself. Thus, whether he was right or wrong, at least
he was not biased by the hope of immortality.

Broad considers both the evidence for the paranormal, so far as it was
available at the time, and the theoretical implications of this evidence
for our view of human nature. These implications are considerable but
obviously they depend critically on the validity of the evidence, since
if there is no good reason to think that any paranormal events have ever
occurred there is no point in debating their significance for us. As
regards evidence, Broad considers two types of events: sporadic cases,
such as hallucinations, hauntings, out-of-the-body experiences and the
like, and laboratory research, which at the time was largely concerned
with card-guessing experiments of the kind pioneered by J.B. Rhine at
Duke University. Here, unfortunately, a part of the case for the
paranormal falls flat on its face, for the experiments conducted by S.G.
Soal, which Broad discusses at some length, are now known to have been
fraudulent.

The greater part of the book, however, is concerned with the sporadic
cases. There is no doubt that there are some well-attested phenomena on
record that are difficult to explain in a conventional rationalistic
framework. Broad offers a thoughtful, detailed, and critical account of
the material collected by the Society for Psychical Research in the
nineteenth century in their Census of Hallucinations. The collective
hallucinations, in which the figure was perceived simultaneously by more
than one witness, are particularly intriguing. Next he looks at trance
mediumship, again drawing on fairly old material, from the nineteenth or
early twentieth centuries. While certainly unwilling to take all this at
face value, he thinks that there is at least prima facie evidence to
suggest that some part of a human being may at times survive physical
death.

But what sort of survival? Broad takes a rather pessimistic view of
this. He thinks there is little to suggest that what survives, if
anything does, is a full-blown personality, or that survival is likely
to endow us with all kinds of supernormal abilities. The picture he
paints is a good deal darker than this. We could, for example, 'conceive
of the possibility of partial coalescence, partial mutual anulment or
reinforcement, interference, etc. between … several human beings, in
conjunction perhaps with non-human psychic flotsam and jetsam which may
exist around us.' There are, he believes. 'mediumistic phenomena and
pathological mental cases not ostensibly involving mediumship, which
would suggest that some of these disturbing possibilities may sometimes
be realized. It is worth remembering (though there is nothing that we
can do about it) that the world as it really is may easily be a far
nastier place than it would be if scientific materialism were the whole
truth and nothing but the truth about it.'

This book is a landmark in the history of parapsychology but it has
dated to some extent. This applies to the Soal material, already noted,
but also to the discussion of out-of-the-body experiences, for the last
few decades have seen an astonishing outpouring of cases of this kind
together with much critical discussion of their significance. On a
rather different note, there are now few mediumistic communications of
the kind that occurred in the early years of the twentieth century,
the nearest equivalent being the enthusiasm for 'channelling' that is
now so prevalent in the USA. But these considerations don't negate the
importance of Broad's book, which is that it is a model for the critical
discussion of alleged paranormal phenomena of all kinds. As such, it is
required reading for anyone who wishes to get to grips with the subject
in a serious way.